Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating podcast. I am your host Roberta. If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning into. And by the end of this episode, please remember to subscribe, give a rating and a review. As you know, our main focus on this podcast are communication skills. My guest today, Robert Kienzle, who goes by Bob, and a good friend of mine, is here to talk to us about science-backed research on how, especially in this hybrid environment, you can excel in your communication skills and in how you conduct your meetings. And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show. Hi, Bob. Hello, Roberta. It's always great when people call me Bob because I know they've been my friend for over six years. A lot of my clients in Hong Kong, I have not introduced myself as Bob at all, just because sometimes there's security, I need my ID. And so explaining to a lot of people why I go by Bob and not Robert just becomes an unnecessary hurdle. So you're right, I do go by Bob most of the time. But in business, it's kind of reverted into my original given name, Robert. Robert, that's right. So Robert, you are the senior consultant at Knowmium. What exactly does that mean? Well, Knowmium is a boutique consulting and training firm based out of Hong Kong. We work with global clients. Most of them are financial. We have a nonprofit division as well. We focus on persuasive communication. We help employees, managers, executives. We help all of them with whatever communication challenges they might be working on. A lot of the topics that we cover are presentation, negotiation, influence. We work on personal branding. We work on training the trainer. So if you have an internal trainer within a company, we might help them learn some of the best practices of being a trainer. We also run a lot of assessments like Hogan assessments or the team management profile by team management systems. Let's first talk about persuasive communication. You know how they say in public speaking, you speak to persuade, you speak to inform, you speak to educate. What exactly is persuasive communication? Basically, anytime you're talking to anybody in business. I mean, you may be giving people information, but there's a reason they need that information. So we could be emailing somebody, we could be having a one-on-one conversation, we could be having a small group meeting, we could be having a public. presentation to a group of 100 people, maybe we're even talking to people through the media, all of that reflects on us, all of that reflects on our business. And ultimately we want people to use the information and use the suggestions that we give them. I think to turn that question around is when are we not being persuasive? Right, whether in personal relationships of business ones, right? Cause we always trying to get the other person to spy whatever it is that we're selling. You've just mentioned all the work that you do with Numium, right? And you call it best practices. First, let's talk about team, thriving teams. What are the best practices for a team to be thriving, to work in synergy? This is a very broad question. If let's say that you were my client, I would ask you a question. I would say, tell me a little bit about your team. Tell me what your team does. Tell me how your team's communicating. Tell me what your team's working on. Because some teams. might mesh and work together very, very well because they have the same communication style or they like doing the same kind of work. There are other teams that are highly diverse in terms of the type of communicators they are. Some people are introverts, some people are extroverts. Some people are very flexible and adaptable. Some people are very rigid and structured. Some people like doing research. Some people like talking to the client. So when you have those types of people in that team environment, they may actually not be communicating and working together as well as two people who do have a similar style. Ultimately, what we would want to look at is for a team to be a highly functioning team, what are people's work styles? What are people's communication styles? And when they're different, how can we identify those differences and respect each other's differences? Just because if they make sense to somebody, they're easier to work with. If I get emails late at night from somebody asking me for information, that might bother me. But if I understand their situation, maybe they're working in a different time zone that week. Maybe there's a deadline that they're working towards at 6 a.m. And I might be much more forgiving of getting late night emails in that one instance. And as you said, time zone, so we... have been pushed to mostly a global hybrid environment since COVID, obviously. Everything is on Zoom. What are some of the do's and don'ts? Apparently a lot of people complain about the fact that since we're on Zoom, everything's a meeting. I don't even have time to do my actual job. What are some of the do's and don'ts? So yeah, if it's just Zoom, let's say it's purely virtual. Everybody's going to be online, especially if we're a meeting leader or a facilitator, Some of the things we need to do is be ready to be present. We want to make sure we have the basic hardware. Are we using a webcam? Ideally, the webcam is around eye level instead of looking up our nose from below on the desk. We ideally want to have some kind of external headset or wired microphone or Bluetooth, just because the easier it is to see us and the easier it is to hear us, the easier it is for people to continually participate. It's easier to focus on. It's just more comfortable to listen to. And when you can see people recreating eye contact and we see that people are not over here doing something else on the side or their cameras off, it really does create that team engagement. There is no perfect replacement for face-to-face, but the technology is getting us much closer if we're willing to use the right technology. So that's the first thing, just having the right tech set up. The second thing would be knowing why we're going to that meeting. And this isn't just about Zoom meetings either. Any meeting, we need to know what those objectives are. We also need to know that it's important for us to be there. The reason so many people are multitasking, turning off their camera, just not listening, it's because they're doing other work because they want to be productive. If we get invited to a meeting or maybe not even invited, if we're told to go to a meeting. Show up, yeah. Yeah, we don't know why. If it's not relevant to me, why should I be fully present with my camera, with my audio? If I've got client emails, I probably should answer those because I feel the meeting's a waste of time. Wouldn't that be considered insubordination? So let's talk about multitasking on virtual. So about 70% of people, we'll start with the low number first, let me go back. 40% of people have admitted that they multitask often or all the time in their virtual meetings. That 40%, that may not be a default on the individual. That might mean they are actually being productive because they're being forced to go to meetings that they shouldn't be in the first place. Or they're invited to meetings that maybe they do need to be in, but the meeting organizer didn't make it clear why they need to be there. It's not clear, they think it's a waste of time. So that's why 40% of people are multitasking heavily. Now, another 30% said that they multitask moderately or sometimes. So you've got 70% of people in the business world and in the surveys that were conducted, 70% of people say that they're multitasking either sometimes or a lot. The other 30 people that say that they're not, we call those liars. Exactly, I'm about to say, are they being honest? Yeah. Everybody multitasks sometimes, unless you work for the perfect organization. If you can say, every single meeting that I go to is 100% productive and I need to be there and they absolutely maximize their time. Let us know who that is. Because most managers around the world say that that's not the case. Speaking of those very managers, do you think the reason they've set up so many meetings since everything going virtual was because it's almost like an indirect way of making sure that people are being productive, which is the complete opposite. The effect is the complete opposite. but they always feel like seeing people on screen makes them think, oh, they're still working. They're not napping at home just because they're home. Yeah, I think there's two good ways to look at this. What you said absolutely exists. When the pandemic hit, people didn't know how to manage virtual teams. Employees didn't necessarily know how to work from home effectively, especially if they've got family members running around or even pet dogs and cats sometimes. But managers often didn't know how to create good remote working environments. So if they're having constant meetings, or even worse, they're putting tracking software on people's computers. This became a big thing in the United States. Now, a lot of countries around the world, huge law violations, or if it wasn't a law violation, it is going to be, or it did become one. That wasn't the norm, but that results in, whether it's meetings or software tracking, That's because there are managers who are not evaluating what their employees are doing at the end of the week, maybe, versus they want to have them accountable. But all that means is that those people, when they go back in the office, when they sit in their chair and their cubicle, they're also probably not getting much done either. They show up at work to be present and visible, but it doesn't mean they're actually doing good work. So the remote work models and the hybrid work models that we're now looking at in 2022, are showing that when people want to be remote workers or they want to be hybrid workers, they are absolutely more productive. They do get more done. When you force somebody back in the office or in some cases you force someone to work at home, if they're not in their ideal environment, they simply don't have as much attention to detail. They don't have as much attention to sitting down and focusing on their work. I know I mentioned that was a two-part kind of way to look at it. That's the first one is people didn't know how to manage and sometimes they still don't know how to manage in those remote or hybrid environments. But let's go back before the pandemic. The second way we can look at this is that the number of meetings that companies were having before the pandemic was already too high. And the number of managers that said a majority of their meetings are a waste of time was also too high before the pandemic. I mean, sure, there were some people doing remote work before the pandemic. But even in that office, there were already too many meetings. And that's the silver lining of this pandemic. A lot of companies that want better efficiency, they are analyzing what can we do moving forward. Our meetings were broken during remote work. But they go and they say, our meetings were broken before remote work. Now as we're going to this hybrid environment, or maybe we are returning to the office in some companies, what can we do to have some better meeting practices moving forward? That is true. So you released a book earlier this year titled Hybrid Live Guide. Would you like to talk to us about that? Absolutely. So even before this year, before 2020, Gnomium and myself as well, we have been working with remote teams. We've been doing virtual training. The pandemic was 99% bad. One of the 1% that was helpful was getting people into virtual work, getting people into remote work, because for some people it is better. And we were fortunate to be able to help our network and a lot of our clients get up to speed on how to have productive virtual training sessions, how to have productive virtual meetings, how to leverage software instead of having meetings. What can we do to leverage software where we can still communicate without everybody logging into Zoom? not only were we experienced with that, but we worked and we developed and we learned from other great people around the world, other trainers and consultants around the world. Then once hybrid started, we said, well, let's, if we can stay ahead of the curve, let's take a look at what people are doing when they are returning to the office sometimes and other people are working at home or maybe they're traveling. So that's where hybrid live guide comes in. It's what can an individual do to set up the right hardware and software? to run meetings and training sessions where some people are in the same room and some people are scattered around the world or they're joining through Zoom or Microsoft Teams or whatever you're using, because it is much more complex. Hybrid meetings, hybrid training sessions can fail very quickly if certain checkpoints are not met. Right. When we set it up correctly, when we facilitate it correctly, hybrid is absolutely effective. but it does take a lot more energy setting up and it does take a lot more energy to actually conduct it. Speaking of conducted, I mean, picture 25 people on the screen, right? And you are the facilitator, you're the one running the meeting. One moment you have to do your job and deserve whatever information you're giving, but at the same time, do you have time to actually check if everybody's engaged, looking at their eye contact, if they're looking into the camera? because you can see if the eyes are moving towards multitasking, as you said earlier. Is that possible or should not that be your focus and just focus on what you need to do? No, I do believe either the facilitator or maybe you have a co-facilitator or producer. Somebody does need to be in charge of making sure people are engaged and paying attention. If people are not engaged or paying attention. It's possible they either weren't ready to be engaged and pay attention. They thought it was some listening only experience or something's wrong with that session or that meeting. And what I say wrong means maybe I haven't given them enough to do. I've given them too many chances to then go and maybe check their email. So let's talk about virtual only for a moment. If it's virtual only, and I've got 20 or 50 people, my personal experience, I am comfortable running that on my own. and I can see the zoom screen. I can also see my second monitor. I can see my virtual camera app. I can see the chat box. I can see the virtual whiteboard that we might be using. Maybe I'm using a third party survey app. I can see all of that, but I'm still paying attention to what's happening with my participants. In a hybrid session, it becomes much more difficult with only one person because now I've got over here, 20 people face to face, and then I've got on one of my monitors in that room, 25 other people. I'm balancing that attention back and forth. That's what I mean. It's much more complex to actually run it because there's so many things to pay attention to when you add those two different groups, virtual and face-to-face. This is where we may want to have a co-host or a co-facilitator or a producer, whatever you wanna call it, who is there to continually monitor that. computer screen for the virtual participants. I can talk to the webcam, I can talk to those virtual participants, but my colleague off to the side may have their own connection and they can sit there and chat, they can sit there and give feedback on if people are turning off their cameras or it looks like people are engaged in some other outside work. Speaking of before the pandemic, we used to have these video conferences. You are based in Hong Kong, but then you have an office in the UK. and you are speaking to your colleagues that used to work. Is it almost like we're doing something similar, but on a little screen? So I'm glad you brought that up, because when I go to a client office and let's say they have the Hong Kong team, they have the UK team, but they may also have the Singapore team, the Tokyo team, the Shanghai team. They may have multiple locations on that one big screen in that smart room. It's set up exactly to do that. If I can do a hybrid session. in a smart room, that saves me 50% of my setup. When I don't do that, I often have to either bring in or arrange to have brought in multiple computers, multiple webcams, multiple microphones, multiple tripods. There may even have to be lights brought in. There's a lot. And when we talk about smart rooms, the audio has been set up where the audio is all through one central system. So there's no feedback. There's no echo effect. If I don't mute or a participant doesn't mute, we don't get that wah, wah sound that we get. But watch what happens when you set up two people on a laptop with two different Zoom connections next to each other. Neither one of them are on mute. Those two different computers are going to give each other feedback, and it's going to absolutely kill anything that happens until that stops. So by me having to set up multiple devices that are not through a centralized system, It is much more complex, but it also brings in the challenge of having participants following certain rules about muting or unmuting. Because if they don't, unless I bring in some very, very professional system, it is going to give that audio feedback. So going back to the book, the hybrid live guide book, that book is set up to where anybody with what's often personal equipment could set up a hybrid environment. You don't have to go buy a thousand dollar piece of audio equipment, but you do need to be aware of what you set up as audio may or may not work depending on how you're doing it. Right. With time management, we've only discussed the part where, you know, do you attend the meeting? Is it relevant to you or should you be more productive by skipping it if it's not relevant to your line of work? But what are other best practices when it comes to time management? So especially given the meetings, one of the best things that we can do even before a meeting starts is get people to do something, especially if it's gonna save time within that meeting. For example, if I have 10 employees on my team, if instead of taking five minutes and going around saying, how was your week? Tell us about your clients. Tell us about the projects you're working on. 10 people doing that for five minutes each, there's 50 minutes already, we've had to come together. In that 50 minutes, my team members, they have not met with their clients. They haven't answered their client emails. They haven't worked with their own other colleagues or other departments that they may need to work with. So instead, why don't we update, you know, writing an update that we can all read or taking a video. If we have the laptops, we have the webcams, we have the microphone set up, record a video for three or four or five minutes. Here's my update. Every team member can do that a day in advance. before the meeting, I can find time on my schedule to watch the other video updates. That's when I'm not with my client. That's when I'm not with my other colleagues. I can do that during my break. I can do that during my easy hour that day. Now when we go into that meeting, there's no more, let's go around and update each other. That's been done. Yeah, that's already been done. So that prep work, now that's only one way to do prep work. Anything that we might be able to do in the meeting should be a collaborative process. If there are individual tasks that need to be prepared, anytime that individual work can be done before the meeting, it's going to save that collective time in the meeting. And that's what a lot of companies are realizing is we can't just have a meeting at 9 a.m. on Monday morning because some people may have other things happening at 9 a.m. If we can have people choose to go to meetings when it's more convenient, then that's going to give them that flexibility. to handle the task they need to handle at 9 a.m. Not necessarily just logging in because that's been the traditional time we've had the team meeting. I know in my corporate career, 9 a.m. Monday mornings, men's staff meetings, it was just standard and half the time, it doesn't mean every Monday morning that something concrete or significant that we were exchanging. And then let's talk about communication skills in a global environment. We work with people from different cultures. They have different ways of not only communicating, but of working in general. So, I mean, again, this is a great question. It's a very broad question. If we were to take a look at first at a team, because I've worked with global teams, let's say that there's seven people on the team, but every single individual is in another country. You know, there's someone in Los Angeles, there's somebody in New York, there's somebody in London, there's somebody in Singapore, and so on. When those people get together, The first thing to understand is the time zones that we might have to work within. But that goes back to what I said earlier, if we can give some kind of updates and information when we're not all having to be online together, we don't need somebody at 7 a.m. in Los Angeles, and then somebody is 10 p.m. in Hong Kong. Sometimes that might be necessary when we need to have a live discussion or a live decision made together. But if we can be aware of how we can communicate without being in that same moment. but to expand on global teams. Let's say that everybody's within Asia. Let's say that time zones are not a big difference. Maybe there's two or three hours of difference here, but it's not a big deal. In this case, it's going to be first, anytime we're talking about global communication and we're talking about global teams and particularly people from other cultures, it is quite important to first have an understanding of how other people might work in another culture or how they might communicate. Some cultures are much quieter, they wait for silence before they speak up. And other cultures are much more talkative. And if you have somebody who's very talkative, I'm raising my hand here, if I am in a global team and I don't pause and create those long moments of silence, or if I don't say, what do you think, or what do you think? I may be dominating the conversation, even though I feel I'm being very productive. and the other people might feel like I'm not giving them a chance to get involved. At the same time, if I'm not aware of this cultural difference, I might feel like the people from a quieter culture are simply not interested. They're simply not contributing, and I feel like they're not doing enough work, or at least in the meeting, they're not being productive. But that's not the case. So that's culturally. We need to understand that there may be cultural trends. But we also then have to be very careful that we don't use those as stereotypes. Just because somebody comes from a quieter culture doesn't mean they're going to be a quiet person. Yeah, we can predict a hundred people from that culture. We could predict maybe a majority of them would be on the quieter side waiting for those long pauses. But that individual, we have no idea how they're going to communicate until we actually get to know them. And then that gets into the next third big piece of the puzzle. What can teams do, especially when they're forming? What can they do to understand individuals' communication and work styles? And that goes back to something that you raised at the very beginning of this interview. What can teams do to learn about each other, their preferences, their pet peeves and their annoyances? Can we make a team communication charter? Sometimes they call that a communication contract where we say, here's something that I hate and here's something that I love. Let's go around and let's talk about this. Here's something I'm gonna ask you don't do. And here's something that I love to do. What does everybody else think about that? We may not get our way. For example, if I say no emails after 5 p.m. because that's just my preference, maybe everybody else says, hey, there's eight people who say I agree with that and we can all agree. And there's two people that say I love emails after 5 p.m. But those two people might agree, listen, the rest of the team doesn't want it. So I'll do my best not to send emails after 5 p.m. However, if I'm the only person that says no emails after 5 p.m. I have to also respect the fact that the rest of the team may not quite work that way. But that's the thing is, are we even talking about this? Are we taking time to talk about this? Whether the team's formed or sometimes teams have been working together for years and they need a refresh. They need to sit down and say, we do have some communication challenges in this team. Let's sit down and create an open conversation about what's working well. what's not working well, but also the individual preferences that we may need to bring up. You said that your company sometimes trains the trainers in those companies. Some companies complain about the fact that, you know, we do all this training, but everything goes back to normal. You know, it's like going to a Tony Robbins seminar for five days and you feel like, oh, I've changed. And then two months later, you're back to your normal self. What makes a team training session... have a lasting impact and things really change for the better. Again, two ways to approach this. There's more than two ways, but here's the two key ways. The first one comes from something that I learned. One of my certifications is in Brinkerhoff's high-performance learning journeys. And what that means is that when you want behavior change, whether somebody's an office employee or somebody's working in a factory, whatever job they're doing, if you want to see behavior change, a one-off training. It has to be supported by activities before the training, training session. The training sessions have to have practice, which I'll talk about in a moment. After that training session, what self application can people do? Now, if there's not another second training session later as a follow-up where they can continually getting feedback from a trainer, your managers, your leaders, and those colleagues are going to have to give people feedback over time. presentation program might help you with one presentation that you work on that day. But that doesn't make you a much better presenter in the long run. You need long-term practice. You need long-term feedback. If you're baking pizzas, if you're doing negotiations, whatever skill it is, it's not a one-day or a two-day or a three-day. It's going to take reinforcement on the job. That's the first thing that's going to make that true behavior change. And that's the big problem that we see in the training industry. We love helping people improve their communications, but what are their managers doing with their employees after the session to create that long-term change? I can help people in eight hours, but eight months later, I'm not there. So that's the first thing is, is that constant practice before, during, but also, especially after on the job application and feedback. The second thing I wanted to mention though, was in that training session, it has to be skills-based and it has to be practice. It can't be information only. We can read a book, we can watch a movie all day, but it doesn't make us better at that skill. Yeah, I can watch people play tennis and say, hey, I think I understand some of the methods they're using to play tennis, but I got to be hitting that ball. I've got to be learning how to grip the racket. And that's really key. The information that needs to come from me, some of that might come before the program ever starts. Some of my clients participants have two weeks in advance to read, to submit ideas, to do maybe some kind of online activity. That sets it up to when we come in, yes, I'm delivering information, but we're going to get down to actual communication practice. You're gonna give a speech, you're gonna practice a negotiation. you're gonna do like networking introductions and small groups, you're going to do email writing analysis, whatever it is, that skill's gonna start pretty quickly in that session. And ideally, maybe even half the time, they're doing something and they're not listening to me. They're listening to each other or they're doing something on their own. So by the time you come, they're even mentally prepared for what you are going to come and train them for. Ideally, yes. That also takes that personal motivation, or sometimes that takes the authority from their company. Some of our clients, they don't require people to turn on their webcams and virtual training, and I'm sitting there going, you know they're just gonna multitask. Like, you know they're gonna multitask. Other clients that I have say, everybody will have their camera on, and everybody will do the pre-session activities. And sometimes I say, hey, would you like me to build in some checks for that? For example, if they submit something, would you like me to ask for their name? That way we can see who hasn't done it. And two days before the session, I can contact them or their manager can contact them and let them know. This is not meant to be a passive listening experience. No. In order to fully participate, these are the three tasks that you'll need to finish and we're still waiting on your results. Because otherwise, like I said, then it's not effective in the longterm. And then negotiation. It seems as though we live in a culture where when negotiating, everybody's always trying to see what I'm going to get out of you. Is that the right perspective when negotiating? That's half, well, not even half, but that's kind of, we wanted to say half and half, that's half. The other half would be, what can I do to help the other side? What can I get out of it? But what do they want out of it? And what can I easily give them that might be helpful for them? The reason is we often approach negotiation as a one-off experience. And if you go into a market and you're going to barter for an item and you're never going to see that person again, you should go in win lose. You do want the best price and you never have to see that person again. But if you have a business relationship, if you have a client or your business to business, if you want a long term relationship, if you approach it, win, lose and you win that other side. probably doesn't want to come work with you again, because you did not have any of their interest in mind. Everybody in negotiation, yes, they're looking out to represent themselves and they're representing their company. We get that. And we both know that, both sides know that. But the two sides that go in and say, let's see what we can do, where it's easy for me to help you and it's easy for you to help me. There may be times I have to say, no, I can't give you everything you want, but I'm at least going to consider it. And maybe we need to find some creative ways. because we came in here talking about price, but when we left, a lot of what we negotiated, some of it was price, but some of it were some other features or other resources that we actually didn't even know we were gonna be discussing that day. So be open to creative ways of the give and take process and not just thinking about the price as you said. Yeah, and it's oftentimes where, yes, I know price is often what we're negotiating in business. But let's think about something that, you know, I think most people would be familiar with. Let's think about two businesses. You've got a major shoe distributor, like a global shoe company, and then you have a single shoe company in a city, right? You've got global business and you've got like a mom and pop shop, right? Right. So let's say you're the buyer, you're contacting this global shoe company and you want to buy a certain amount of shoes for a certain price and you're negotiating that price. However, There's a lot of other things that could be involved if we brought it up. For example, first of all, the ongoing long-term relationship, which could turn into better customer service or better business to business service. You also have shipping times, you have shipping costs, you may have warranties, but what happens when somebody opens a shoe store? They may need to do some advertising that costs money. The global business already has advertisements, they have PR. They have things that certain smaller store might be able to use that saves them money, but it may also help the global shoe store in their advertising. Quick example. If I asked for a 10% discount on an order of shoes and the other side said, I can give you a 10% discount if you can put our shoe company's signs in your window. So we're giving you a discount, but you're also doing some advertising for our particular global brand. The other side might say, you know what, I'm happy to do that because not only am I getting the discount that I wanted, I want big signs from big global companies. I have materials that I can give. I have whether they're paper flyers or whether they're just, you know, QR codes that link back. Those are things that my customers want. when they come into my store. Those are freebies that I'm getting. And what does that cost that global company? Not much. No. So it's not only about price, but there's so many other resources that might have benefits for either one side that's easy for the other side to get, or sometimes there's resources that actually do help both sides. We just mentioned something here regarding price. You know, LinkedIn lately has become, I don't know if that's my experience. You have a lot of people who say, because it's based on what you post. I love your work. I think I can help you. They use the word help. I can help you do this with your podcast. It's become such a sales driven network. Is it a problem that I have a problem with that or am I being abnormal or unreasonable? It's the nature of the beast. It could be LinkedIn and people are contacting us asking to do work with us. They obviously want us to pay them to do something for us. Again, let's take LinkedIn out of the equation. Let's go back to the single shoe store. You may have somebody that walks in your shoe store one day and they say, hi, I'm a local advertiser. Hi, I'm a local newspaper salesperson. I would like for you to pay me money and I'll do the service for you and I'll help your business. Just because it happens on LinkedIn, it's been happening before LinkedIn. Here's what's actually, I'm glad you brought this up, Roberta, because this is something that, you know, Gnomium and a lot of the people within our bigger network have been doing. It's actually been helping people first and not asking for money at all. I'll give you a few examples. There are groups and some of them are private group chats. Some of them are public groups where professionals can go and have these conversations. During the pandemic, somebody might say, hey, has anybody tried this software app? Hey, has anybody tried this feature on Zoom? How did that go for you? Now, I'm a communication consultant and there's somebody else who's a communication consultant and the world might see us as competitors, but we have our own unique styles. They might specialize in one thing, I might specialize in another. Now, if you go into this saying, I'm this consultant and everybody's my competitor, it's gonna be hard to like have that bigger network, but I can tell you that by having conversations and giving recommendations, doing free webinars and doing collaborations with people, more often than not. those people are later sending people where they say, hey, I have a client that I've been working with. They wanted something that I either can't do because of my schedule, or I don't feel like it's my specialty. Would you like to have a conversation with them? So that's not an immediate turnaround, but by spending time after time or in the longterm, creating networks where you're helping people and other people seem to be helpful as well. That does turn into the long run of different connections and you know, if somebody helped me and answered some of my questions or spent 30 minutes with me, and something came up in the future with one of my clients, who am I gonna think about first? It's that person who's helped me. Yeah. And when we talk about business to business, so when you talk about people contacting you saying, hi, I'm an advertiser, I can help your podcast, whatever, that person is giving you a sales pitch, but has that person ever done anything to help you or offer to help? It's the first time I hear from them. You know how on LinkedIn, you send a connection request to someone you don't know? Sometimes it says write a note and give Roberta a reason why you want to connect with her. Because I don't know them. We've never spoken nothing. The self-pitch is in that note that is asking for the connection request. I'm not disrespecting anybody's household. Please don't get me wrong. But I just feel like we've become, especially with everything going online, we've become just the culture of I want to do this. What are you going to pay me? But speaking on that, I wanted to just quickly mention your two other books before you go. Absolutely. So nomium.com, which I'm sure you'll put the link in there, but no as in knowledge, no M-I-U-M, we're the element of knowledge. So nomium.com, we have on the landing page, toolkits, and you'll see hybrid live guide. You'll see radically remote, which is our... virtual communication and virtual facilitation. There's a free book. There's over 75 online activity guides. What that means is if you're running a training session or if you are a manager just holding a meeting, what are some interactions you can have over Zoom that are interactive and get people either thinking or talking or just engaged? We also have a ton of video walkthroughs. If you ever want to learn certain software that helps people have meetings or training sessions, not only do we have... the links, but we actually have video walkthroughs where we're talking about some of the features. The third free resource we have is called Insight Box, and that's a sales communication book. It focuses on virtual sales and it also focuses on sales relationships. So when we go into a conversation, it's kind of like your negotiation question earlier. What am I trying to get out of my client? Yes, I'm trying to get out of sale. However, how can I approach this from their point of view? What would be helpful to them? What can I do for them? Or at least what can I do to help understand them and give them that insight that some of the other salespeople may not be giving them? Right. I can tell you what my shoes do, but have I understood why you're looking for shoes in the first place? That's the question. And speaking the language, you literally speak to yourself when you think about shoes. That's how I do the sales pitch. From the other person's point of view, you mean? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, and that comes down to a lot of, you know, questions and listening, or it comes into the long term relationships that we form. We may not make every sale, but if we make people comfortable to do business with us, if they're comfortable telling us about what they need, they may or may not buy from us just based on price. But I might be the first person that they come back to because they say Robert's the person who's not trying to pitch me right away. Robert's the person saying, well, what do you need? I don't want to pitch you something that you don't need, but that's what a lot of salespeople have done in the past. That is very true. Before you go, please give us some last words of wisdom. If there's anything I never asked you that you wanted to share today. That's a great closing question. I would say this, every single person, whether they're a manager, an employee, whether they're a trainer, whether they're a public speaker, every single person has their own style. We can all go. We can read the same books, we can watch the same webinars, you know, we can take a lot of the same courses. That's the first step. But ultimately we're going to have to find our own style. And that style goes back to figuring out what's going to work best for some of our clients. And if we're a manager, our employees, adapting what we know to the style that works best for us, but also continually focusing on the other people that we're working with. That's really the bread and butter of success. And again, I can read the same news article that you read and we can have absolutely two different perspectives and two different opinions on it. And that's totally okay. The facts didn't change, but how I might use those facts and how you might use those facts, we need to be adaptable. We need to understand each other's perspective, but then we also need to be able to be flexible and say, here's different ways to use this information. Words of wisdom from Robert Kienzle. the senior consultant of Knowmium, a Hong Kong based company that specializes in communication skills training and leadership coaching. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much for having me, Roberta. I do look forward to when we can have another face-to-face meeting. Yeah, but the virtual one has been excellent. You have shared some great insights with us and we really appreciate you. Thank you for your time. Don't forget to subscribe, give a rating and a review, and we'll be with you on the next episode. Do you want to give us any other contacts on social other than nomium.com? Anybody and everybody is welcome to look me up on LinkedIn. I do post what I think is helpful information, also links to other events or free resources that are going on. I have quite a few articles that I've written. My... Most recent article was about multitasking and how you can, as an individual, reduce your personal multitasking if you want to focus more in the meetings that you attend. I'm gonna put in your LinkedIn URL as well. That's excellent stuff. Thank you so much, Robert Kienzle, everybody.